WILFRED OWEN - DULCE ET DECORUM EST, Text of poem and notes Wilfred Owen Minds at War A comprehensive anthology of poetry of the First World War. All the greatest war poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and war poems of over 70 other notable poets. All set in the context of the poets' lives and historical records. With historic photographs and cartoons. Edited by David Roberts. 400 pages ï¿½15-99 (UK) Best known poem of the First World War (with notes) Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4) Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind. Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys!

ï¿½ An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . . Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12) Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13) To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.(15) Thought to have been written between 8 October 1917 and March, 1918 Notes on Dulce et Decorum Est 1. DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country.

In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country. 2. Flares - rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.) 3. Distant rest - a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer 4. Hoots - the noise made by the shells rushing through the air 5. Outstripped - outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle 6. Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells 7. Gas! - poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned 8. Helmets - the early name for gas masks 9. Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue 10. Panes - the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks 11.

Guttering - Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling 12. Cud - normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier's mouth 13. High zest - idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea 14. ardent - keen 15. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - see note 1 above. These notes are taken from the book, Out in the Dark, Poetry of the First World War, where other war poems that need special explanations are similarly annotated. The ideal book for students getting to grips with the poetry of the First World War. Pronunciation The pronunciation of Dulce is DULKAY. The letter C in Latin was pronounced like the C in "car". The word is often given an Italian pronunciation pronouncing the C like the C in cello, but this is wrong. Try checking this out in a Latin dictionary! - David Roberts.

Out in the Dark and Minds at War This poem appears in both Out in the Dark and Minds at War, but the notes are found only in Out in the Dark. Minds at War has much more background information, for example, more poets' letters, biographical and historical information, etc than Out in the Dark. Out in the Dark has 192 pages. Minds at War has 410 pages. To understand more about Wilfred Owen's war experience, his breakdown, how his poetry developed rapidly after meeting another British war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, it may be worth reading one of these two books. Both contain many more poems by Wilfred Owen and extracts from his letters. Both books provide a substantial selection of the greatest war poetry of the First World War and fascinating insights into the experience of one of the most terrible wars in the history of mankind. Both books are edited by David Roberts, the editor of this website, and have been in print for more than ten years. Click in the left column to access more information about these books and to read comments and reviews.

TWO READINGS OF DULCE ET DECORUM EST A new reading by David Roberts bringing out the meaning of this powerful poem You can view this video on YouTube by going to the YouTube search box and entering "Dulce David Roberts". You can then leave comments there or express "like" (or otherwise). A reading of the poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, with archive film footage Copyright Free use of this page for students' individual personal use Notes on Dulce et decorum est copyright © David Roberts and Saxon Books 1998. Free use by students for personal use only. If reproduced by teachers for non-commercial use with their own students the copyright should be covered under a general license for photocopying - in which case, if the institution is asked to record copyright ownership it should be attributed to Saxon Books/David Roberts/Out in the Dark. Re-sale or wide distribution (more than a class set) Anyone wishing to use the poem with these notes in a publication for resale or for wide use in an educational or similar institution (beyond an individual teacher's use with his or her own class(es)) should contact the author. See the Contact page of this website.

Copyright ï¿½ 1998 Saxon Books - David Roberts Dulce et Decorum Est - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up poem About this poet On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire, England. After the death of his grandfather in 1897, the family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute. After another move in 1906, he continued his studies at the Technical School in Shrewsbury.

Interested in the arts at a young age, Owen began to experiment with poetry at 17. After failing to gain entrance into the University of London, Owen spent a year as a lay assistant to Reverend Herbert Wigan in 1911 and went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English. By 1915, he had become increasingly interested in World War I and enlisted in the Artists' Rifles group. After training in England, Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was wounded in combat in 1917 and evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh after being diagnosed with shell shock. There he met another patient, poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as a mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H. G. Wells. It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est." His poetry often graphically illustrated the horrors of warfare, the physical landscapes that surrounded him, and the human body in relation to those landscapes.

His verses stand in stark contrast to the patriotic poems of war written by earlier poets of Great Britain, such as Rupert Brooke. Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918, and in August, he returned to France. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens. He was killed on November 4 of that year while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors. He was 25 years old. The news reached his parents on November 11, Armistice Day. The collected Poems of Wilfred Owen appeared in December 1920, with an introduction by Sassoon, and he has since become one of the most admired poets of World War I.

A review of Owen's poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, read, "Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers." About Owen's post-war audience, the writer Geoff Dyer said, "To a nation stunned by grief, the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke." Dulce Et Decorum Est | The Wilfred Owen Association The Wilfred Owen Association Join us on Facebook Dulce Et Decorum Est In October 1917 Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart, "Here is a gas poem, done yesterday……..the famous Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means of course it is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet!

and decorous!" While the earliest surviving draft is dated 8th October 1917, a few months later, at Scarborough or Ripon, he revised it. The title is ironic. The intention was not so much to induce pity as to shock, especially civilians at home who believed war was noble and glorious. It comprises four unequal stanzas, the first two in sonnet form, the last two looser in structure. Stanza 1 sets the scene. The soldiers are limping back from the Front, an appalling picture expressed through simile and metaphor. Such is the men's wretched condition that they can be compared to old beggars, hags (ugly old women). Yet they were young! Barely awake from lack of sleep, their once smart uniforms resembling sacks, they cannot walk straight as their blood-caked feet try to negotiate the mud. "Blood-shod" seems a dehumanising image- we think of horses shod not men. Physically and mentally they are crushed. Owen uses words that set up ripples of meaning beyond the literal and exploit ambiguity. "Distant rest" - what kind of rest? For some the permanent kind?

"Coughing" finds an echo later in the poem, while gas shells dropping softly suggests a menace stealthy and devilish. Note how in line 8 the rhythm slackens as a particularly dramatic moment approaches. In Stanza 2, the action focuses on one man who couldn't get his gas helmet on in time. Following the officer's command in line 9, "ecstasy" (of fumbling) seems a strange word until we realise that medically it means a morbid state of nerves in which the mind is occupied solely with one idea. Lines 12-14 consist of a powerful underwater metaphor, with succumbing to poison gas being compared to drowning. "Floundering" is what they're already doing (in the mud) but here it takes on more gruesome implications as Owen introduces himself into the action through witnessing his comrade dying in agony. Stanza 3. The aftermath. From straight description Owen looks back from a new perspective in the light of a recurring nightmare. Those haunting flares in stanza 1 foreshadowed a more terrible haunting in which a friend, dying, "plunges at me" before "my helpless sight", an image Owen will not forget. Another aspect again marks Stanza 4.

Owen attacks those people at home who uphold the war's continuance unaware of its realities. If only they might experience Owen's own "smothering dreams" which replicate in small measure the victim's sufferings. Those sufferings Owen goes on to describe in sickening detail. The "you" whom he addresses in line 17 can imply people in general but also perhaps, one person in particular, the "my friend" identified as Jessie Pope, children's fiction writer and versifier whose patriotic poems epitomised the glorification of war that Owen so despised. Imagine, he says, the urgency, the panic that causes a dying man to be "flung" into a wagon, the "writhing" that denotes an especially virulent kind of pain. Hell seems close at hand with the curious simile "like a devil's sick of sin". Sick in what sense? Physically? Satiated? Then that "jolt". No gentle stretcher-bearing here but agony intensified. Owen's imagery is enough to sear the heart and mind. There are echoes everywhere in Owen and with "bitter as the cud", we are back with "those who die as cattle".

(ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH). "Innocent" tongues? Indeed, though some tongues were anything but innocent in Owen's opinion. Jessie Pope for one perhaps, his appeal to whom as "my friend" is doubtless ironic, and whose adopted creed, the sweetness and meetness of dying for one's country he denounces as a lie which children should never be exposed to. A poem seemingly written at white heat. Harsh, effective in the extreme, yet maybe too negative to rank among Owen's finest achievements: those poems in which he transcends the scorn and the protest and finds the pity. Copyright: Kenneth Simcox , 2000 Dulce Et Decorum Est Poem by Wilfred Owen - Poem Hunter Dulce Et Decorum Est Poem by Wilfred Owen - Poem Hunter Dulce Et Decorum Est - Poem by Wilfred Owen Autoplay next video Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod.

All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen | Poetry Foundation Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Notes: Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Source: Poems (Viking Press, 1921) Discover this poem's context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poet Dulce et Decorum est - Modernism Lab Essays Dulce et Decorum est By Andrew Williamson Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” ( 1917 ) is one of the most famous poems to emerge from the ranks of the “soldier-poets” who fought in the First World War.

In a nightmarish dream-vision of trench-warfare, the poem’s speaker witnesses the “drowning” of a fellow soldier in a sea of mustard gas. At the climactic moment of their encounter, the hallucinatory realism of the poem’s first four stanzas gives way to an accusatory, second-person address in t he fifth. The poem concludes by denouncing the naïve proponents of “the old Lie” that defined the propagandistic war poetry of the period: that to die for one’s country was not only noble, but beautiful too. “Dulce et decorum est” was composed during a period of convalescence from mental disorder. In 1917 , Owen was diagnosed with “shell shock”—what would today be known as post-traumatic stress disorder—and was granted a reprieve from the war. He spent the majority of his time at the English psychiatric hospital Craiglockhart, and it was there that Owen encountered fellow soldier-poet and eventual literary mentor Siegfried Sassoon .

Sassoon encouraged Owen to channel his indignation over the war into poetry and, in this regard, can be seen as a literary forefather to “Dulce et decorum est” and Owen’s other war poems, among them "Strange Meeting," "Insensibility" and "S.I.W." Owen’s stint at Craiglockhart marked a formative step in his poetic development. On December 31, 1917, he boasted to his mother that, “I go out of this year a Poet,…as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet.” [1] Owen would not live to see another New Year’s Eve; he died in combat on November 4, 1918, at the age of 25, exactly one week before the signing of the Armistice. During his lifetime, Owen witnessed the publication of only four of his own poems, and it was not until 1920 that Sassoon would collect and publish a posthumous volume of his works.

Title and Dedication With the title “Dulce et decorum est [pro patria mori]” (Latin: “Sweet and proper it is [to die for one’s country]”), Owen situates his poem in a context at once classical and contemporary. The original source of the title is Horace’s ode 3.2, a paean to the glory of dying in battle for the good of the nation, although the title also suggests a connection with a more immediate source: the school (if one may call it that) of war poets whose work presented a saccharine and therefore palatable rendering of trench warfare to a blissfully ignorant English readership. Their work, which blurs the line between poetry and propaganda, was collected in two volumes by the editor Galloway Kyle, a pseudonym for the publisher Macdonald Erskine.

Each of these volumes—Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men ( 1916 ) and More Songs of the Fighting Men ( 1917 )—contains a poem with the title “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (one by Sydney Oswald, a major in the King’s Rifle Corps, and the other by Harold Jarvis, a corporal in The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry). With one eye on the past and another on the present, this two-pronged address evokes the unsettling pertinence of a two-millenia-old invitation to battle. [2] It is no coincidence that each of these volumes should include a poem with the Horatian dictum for a title: formal education in Latin literature was a rite of passage for upper-class public school students of the era, and the line would have been a commonplace among educated English readers and writers.

Sydney Oswald’s poem, appearing in the first of Kyle's two volumes, epitomizes the highly regular metrical and rhyming verse structures of WWI soldier poetry: They gave their lives for England; did not pause To count the glorious cost, when England bade Her sons to strive in Freedom’s holy cause, But armed to fight. Full soon they died, yet made A name of lasting glory; gained applause From all the brave; a fame which cannot fade. [3] With its formal rigidity, the poem performs the role of a mortician: it embalms the body of the dead English soldier in structured verse and, by doing so, preserves the image of him as a dignified and unsuffering creature. Whereas Oswald and Jarvis swallow whole and regurgitate the commonplace Horatian logic, however, Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” ironizes the Latin tag by showing war for what it really is. Not sweet, but bitter; not proper, but savage. By lopping off the second half of Horace’s line in his title, the speaker of Owen’s poem establishes the tone of resistance that Oswald and Jarvis’s poems lack.

Although these two war-poets are convenient foils against which to imagine Wilfred Owen, the poet had someone else in mind at the time of composition: Jessie Pope, a writer and illustrator of children’s books which depicted battle in similarly glowing terms. Pope’s verse, like that of the soldier-poets in Kyle’s editions, is simplistic in both rhyme and meter, and this simplicity lends it the nursery-rhyme quality tailored to the sensibilities of her young audience. One of Pope’s poems imagines the qualities of an ideal male suitor, and demands that: Who buys her an engagement ring, And finds her kind and kissing, Must have one member in a sling Or, preferably, missing. [4] In the first draft of “Dulce et Decorum est,” Owen dedicated his poem “To Jessie Pope etc” (see image). A later version obscures the exact identity of the addressee by calling Pope merely “a certain Poetess,” but by the time Sassoon published the final version, the dedication had been scrapped entirely.

The identity of the original addressee gives particular resonance to the speaker’s acerbic indictment, in the fifth stanza, of the one who “tell[s] with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” From among the hordes of pro-war poets that propagandized in favor of self-sacrifice, Owen singled out Pope. Why? As the poem suggests, her verse targets the innocent—children—who lack the individual awareness to reject the classic call to arms. Formal Structure One source of ironic tension in “Dulce et Decorum est” is the disjuncture between the poem’s subject and its title; another is the disjuncture between its subject and its formal structure.

Like the “songs of the fighting men” in Kyle’s editions, “Dulce et Decorum est” demonstrates an affinity for regular meter and rhyme, but unlike that other soldier-poetry, this verse form seems to stand at odds with the pandemonium that Owen’s words describe: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all-blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. (1-8) The stanza consists of two quatrains of rhymed iambic pentameter, although with several spondaic substitutions (“knock-kneed”; “blood-shod”; “Five-Nines”) whose strong stresses echo the percussive soundscape of the battlefield.

Owen is commonly associated with the technique known as “pararhyme” (a breed of slant rhyme that relies on similar consonant rather than vowel sounds), but the rhymes in this poem are decidedly traditional. In this regard, Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” bears all the formal trappings of Oswald’s poem and Pope’s nursery rhyme, but Owen subverts rather than supports their moral approbation of self-sacrifice. The critic Paul Fussell observes that “…a large part of the ironic effect of First World War poems, those dwelling on meaningless slaughters, fatuous errors, and appalling mess and hopelessness results from their being conducted with so high a regard for order.” [5] This discrepancy between sound and sense—Owen’s rejection of what William Wimsatt and John Hollander call “verbal mimesis”—helps to establish the mocking tone of this poem, and makes the loss that it describes still more poignantly bitter. Owen, the Georgian Poets and Literary Modernism Issued from humble beginnings as the son of a train station manager, Owen tried and failed to win a scholarship to study at University College, Reading.

[6] He was not a gentleman but longed to become one. When the war broke out, Owen was teaching English in southwest France, and took advantage of a program that allowed anyone returning to England from abroad to become an officer, a position that someone of Owen’s social status could not otherwise have attained. The war that catalyzed Owen’s poetic imagination and that facilitated his entry, via Sassoon, into London’s cloistered circles of literary aesthetes was also, ironically, the war that killed him. When he died in 1918 , Owen stood at the threshold of both his own poetic maturation and the full-fledged emergence of literary modernism in the early 1920’s. The close association of Owen’s name with "pararhyme" is deceptive, suggesting that he had developed a unique and sustained poetics by the time of his death; in fact he had not. He composed only a handful of poems with pararhymed verse, and those clustered near the very end of his career. In the poetry drafted before his encounter with Sassoon in 1917 , Owen remains overshadowed by the literary identities of his declared Romantic archetypes: John Keats and Percy Shelley.

If Owen can be associated with any poetic movement at all, it is with the Georgians, a group of traditionally-informed pre-Moderns whose ranks included Sassoon, Robert Graves and D.H. Lawrence . The tension between theme and form in “Dulce et Decorum est” highlights Owen’s uneasy relationship with modern poetry. “[I]t is notable,” Paul Fussell writes, “that while others like Eliot, Pound and Joyce were writing ‘experimentally,’ the poets of the First World War tended to write in a traditional style….What one encounters [in Owen’s poem] is so compelling and ‘modern’ (in the nasty way) that it’s easy to overlook the poem’s non-modern form.” [7] “Dulce et Decorum est” complicates the mandate of Pound’s nascent modernist poetics that, in order to “make it new,” modern poetry must reject “sentimental” verse forms as unfit for expressing the horror of modern trench warfare. Although the bulk of what we now call modern poetry had yet to be written in Owen’s lifetime, “Dulce et Decorum est” nonetheless engages in conversation with this burgeoning poetics of formal disjuncture.

↑ Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters ed. Bell. (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1985) p. 306. ↑ C.f. Paul Norgate, “Wilfred Owen and the Soldier-Poets,” as published in The Review of English Studies 40:160 (November, 1989), p. 520. “In Owen’s war poetry, reference or allusion has almost always an ironizing function. The primary thrust of this irony is in one of two directions—towards the situation of war itself, or towards the source of the allusion.” ↑ Sydney Oswald, as published in Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men ed. Galloway Kyle (Erskine Macdonald: London, 1916) p. 69. ↑ Jessie Pope, “The Beau Ideal” as excerpted in Wilfred Owen’s Voices by Douglas Kerr (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1993) p. 322. ↑ Paul Fussell, Introduction to The Norton Book of Modern War ed. Fussell (Norton: New York, 1991), p. 35.

↑ Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen (Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 2003), p.105. ↑ Fussell, 35. Dulce et Decorum Est Summary - eNotes.com Dulce et Decorum Est Summary Wilfred Owen Dulce et Decorum Est Summary In "Dulce et Decorum Est," Wilfred Owen vividly depicts the horrors of war. As a soldier in World War I, he experienced the ignobility of war firsthand. By depicting the death and destruction in detail, he proves that war isn't heroic at all. Owen depicts soldiers trudging through the unsanitary trenches, weakened by injuries and fatigue. Suddenly, the men come under attack and must quickly put on their gas masks to prevent the green gas from choking them. One man dies horrifically in front of the speaker. The speaker argues that if the reader had seen this man die, they wouldn't glorify war. He knows that the general public has a glamorized view of war, and he wants to dispel it. Download Study Guide Start Free Trial Start your free trial with eNotes to access more than 30,000 study guides.

Get help with any book. link Link Wilfred Owen set his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” during World War I on the western front in France. His purpose—to protest against the mentality that perpetuates war—is unmistakable, but what sets the work apart from much other antiwar literature is the effectiveness of his tightly controlled depiction of war. The first fourteen of the poem’s twenty-eight lines comprise a sonnet that vividly describes a single terrible moment. The last twelve address the reader directly, explaining the significance or moral of the incident. The speaker is among a company of exhausted men who after a stint at the front are marching unsteadily toward the rear when they are suddenly overtaken by poison gas. After they hastily pull on their gas masks, the speaker sees through the misty lenses that one of them, somehow maskless, is staggering helplessly toward him. He watches the man succumb to the gas, desperately groping the air between them as he drops to the ground, like someone drowning. The third stanza shifts the context to the speaker’s dreams. In a single couplet, the speaker declares that in all his dreams he sees that soldier plunging toward him.

In the final stanza, he turns to the readers, telling them that if they, too, could have experienced such dreams and watched the soldier dying on the wagon into which the soldiers flung him, they would never repeat to their children “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.” Throughout the war, this Latin phrase—a quotation from the Roman poet Horace (Odes III. 2.13, 23 and 13 b.c.e.)—was frequently used in inspirational poems and essays. In a letter to his mother, Owen provides the translation, “It is sweet and meet to die for one’s country,” and he expostulates sarcastically, “Sweet! And decorous!” Owen is often judged to be the most remarkable of the group of “war poets” who emerged during World War I. Although “Dulce et Decorum Est” is seldom considered to be technically Owen’s finest poem, it is nevertheless among his most famous because it captures so compellingly not only the tribulations of the soldiers who fought in the war but also their belief that the patriotic rhetoric on the home front and the government’s refusal to negotiate a peace were more to blame for their suffering than the opposing soldiers.

Owen, who was an officer with the Manchester Regiment, planned to publish “Dulce et Decorum Est” in a volume that was to present the truth about the war, which he knew to be utterly at odds with the belligerent cant that appeared daily in newspapers and in magazines in England. Two drafts of the poem carry the dedication “To Jessie Pope etc” (two other drafts simply say “To a certain Poetess”), suggesting that Owen had originally specifically targeted such individuals as Jessie Pope, whose collection of children’s verses, Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times (1916), was intended to kindle enthusiasm for the war. In the end, Owen removed the sarcastic dedication, perhaps to make clear that he wished to address a much broader readership. Most people in England greeted the outbreak of war in August, 1914, with enthusiasm. Wars of recent memory were limited, distant affairs; the people expected adventure and heroism from a contained conflict that would be over by Christmas.

Instead, after the second month of the war, when Germany’s march on Paris was halted at the Marne, the opposing armies dug themselves into trenches facing each other across a narrow strip known as No Man’s Land, a line that stretched across Belgium and France. In part because of the efficiency of machine guns and because tanks were not deployed until near the end of the war, neither side was able to dislodge the other. Millions of men lost their lives in costly and fruitless attempts to break the stalemate; in just one day, July 1, 1916, the great offensive at the River Somme took the lives of sixty thousand men. Rats, lice, and the sight of exposed corpses were inescapable conditions of trench warfare. By the time the war ended, all those who experienced the horrors of trench warfare were forced to abandon their belief in the superiority of European civilization and the idea of European progress. In the opening lines of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen vividly portrays the price of trench warfare, the exhaustion of soldiers who become like old women, “hags,” coughing, lame, blind, and deaf.

The poet speaks for these individuals who, though they no longer function in tidy military unison, are joined by their shared experience of a nightmare that seems just at the point of being over when the new assault arrives. The deadly gases (at first chlorine, later phosgene and mustard gas) that remain a hallmark of World War I were first used on a large scale on the Western Front. Although soldiers were equipped with respirator masks, more than one million men died from such attacks. The gas, whose effects Owen describes in the second stanza, is the odorless and colorless mustard gas frequently used after July, 1917. Detectable only by its sting, it gave its victims only seconds to protect themselves and caused severe, often fatal, burns to exposed skin and lungs. Owen also mentions other miseries of the “Great War,” such as the unusually heavy rainfalls that turned the fighting zone into a bog in which the men suffered crippling foot ailments and sometimes even drowned. The poem also expresses “the pity of war,” the theme Owen also articulated in the short preface he drafted for the intended collection.

English poetry, he explains, is “not yet fit to speak” of heroes, but speaking the truth of war may act as a warning to the next generation. Owen uses the word “pity” in a special sense, one that encompasses a profound fellow feeling for all those who suffer; ultimately, that includes everyone. Hence, his protest against war extends to become a protest against all inhumanity. The ability of Owen’s poems to transcend the particular circumstances of their creation was a quality some of his early critics, including the poet Yeats, failed to see. “Dulce et Decorum Est” accomplishes this as effectively as anything Owen wrote, for the focus of its protest is not the pain suffered by a few men but rather the transhistorical “Lie.” The horrible death of the gassed soldier exposes the fallacy behind the oft-repeated, high-sounding Latin epigram: The poem’s protest is against an abuse of language. Owen drafted the poem in August, 1917, at the age of twenty-four, while he was convalescing at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He finished it about one year later, perhaps shortly before his death.

The event described in the poem is almost certainly based on actual experience, as Owen reported such “smothering” dreams to his doctor. Recovering from concussion, trench fever, and “shell shock” or “neurasthenia” (terms often used as euphemisms for exhaustion), Owen’s stay at Craiglockhart was crucial in his poetic development, in part because he became acquainted with the more experienced soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon and, even more important, because it gave him a chance to work steadily during a period when his sense of poetic purpose was most urgent. Owen was deeply concerned about the technical problems involved in the expression of his passionate convictions. Some of his later poems use striking methods such as half rhyme, but in this poem, too, Owen’s technical mastery is impressive. The first stanza employs heavy, single-syllable rhymes throughout; to convey exhaustion, Owen breaks up the rhythm, which composes itself in the third line. After several comparatively regular lines, a dramatic shift occurs with the fragmentary syntax of the first lines of the stanza about the gas.

The four repeating “um” sounds of those line in the words “fumbling,” “clumsy,” “someone,” “stumbling” produce interior rhymes that create a sudden, panicked sense of double time. After the ellipsis, an eerie, dreamlike calm sets in as the poet coolly, objectively describes the man drowning “as in a green sea.” The couplet literally rehearses the moment as do the dreams, and in place of a rhyme it repeats the falling cadence of “drowning” with extraordinary effect, as though poetry itself must stumble and fall at this juncture. The final stanza exploits the steady, relentless rhythm of iambic pentameter for the purpose of “accumulatio,” heaping up declarations in couplets that each describe more of what could be seen. “My friend” announces a last turn: a direct accusation against the time-honored, respectable, capitalized “Lie.” The extra foot in line 25 shatters the iambic pentameter and produces particularly heavy stresses on the two long syllables of “old Lie,” enhancing the resonance of the foreshortened half-line that ends the poem.

In a late revision, Owen substituted lines 23 and 24 (“Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—”) for two lines that introduced a note of eroticism that might have distracted attention from Owen’s main purpose (“And think how, once, his head was like a bud,/ Fresh as a country rose, and keen, and young,—”) The new lines recall images from Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320), and their guttural sounds enhance the impression of outrage. After a year of convalescence, Owen returned to the front in August, 1918. In October, he received the Military Cross, and on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice, he was gunned down on the Sambre Canal. Owen published only five poems during his lifetime, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” was first published posthumously in Poems by Wilfred Owen (1920), the eleventh poem in a volume of only twenty-three.

His reputation grew rapidly after the publication of Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of his poems, which included a lengthy memoir. Although the C. Day Lewis edition of Owen’s poems is now considered standard, “Dulce et Decorum Est” is often reprinted in versions that differ significantly. In particular, some editors follow Blunden in preferring a manuscript variant of line 8, “Of gas shells dropping softly behind.” Wilfred Owen - Poet | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets First World War On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire, England.

After the death of his grandfather in 1897, the family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute. After another move in 1906, he continued his studies at the Technical School in Shrewsbury. Interested in the arts at a young age, Owen began to experiment with poetry at 17. After failing to gain entrance into the University of London, Owen spent a year as a lay assistant to Reverend Herbert Wigan in 1911 and went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English. By 1915, he had become increasingly interested in World War I and enlisted in the Artists' Rifles group. After training in England, Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was wounded in combat in 1917 and evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh after being diagnosed with shell shock. There he met another patient, poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as a mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H. G. Wells.

It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est." His poetry often graphically illustrated the horrors of warfare, the physical landscapes that surrounded him, and the human body in relation to those landscapes. His verses stand in stark contrast to the patriotic poems of war written by earlier poets of Great Britain, such as Rupert Brooke. Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918, and in August, he returned to France. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens. He was killed on November 4 of that year while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors. He was 25 years old. The news reached his parents on November 11, Armistice Day. The collected Poems of Wilfred Owen appeared in December 1920, with an introduction by Sassoon, and he has since become one of the most admired poets of World War I.

A review of Owen's poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, read, "Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers." About Owen's post-war audience, the writer Geoff Dyer said, "To a nation stunned by grief, the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke." by this poet

Question: Who wrote the poem Dulce et Decorum est?
Answer: WILFRED OWEN